MindFeed

Ok, so after having spent many hours writing stuff for my thesis, I decided it would be a good idea to go back to a bit of programming as there is only so much you can write before you mind falls to pieces. Luckily this was a wise option as I believe I have fixed the bug where by GPS data would be buffered, say for example if you went indoors for 10 mins, you would have 10 mins buffer of “nothing”. Thus when you came outside, and went home, only half of the trip would be recorded if it took you 20 minutes to walk back, as 10 minutes of that trip will be the buffered data from when you were indoors. After a quick test it seems to have solved it, but an epic trip to Sainsburys is in order to confirm it has done the job!

Wooo!!! Finally finished the business plan yesterday and handed it in today. All 11,300 beautiful words of it! Huzzah! Now to get back to the implementation and thesis writing!

Also I think the cover I made for it is damn sexy so its being put here too

Not sure why this is happening, but the onboard GPS for the Glowfiish whilst works and is on average a lot smoother and accurate than the Bluetooth receivers, seems to only get half the trip recorded on all occasions - almost like it is caching data and doing some processing on it based on previous results before it gives me new data. I am not sure why this is, so for now I shall be sticking with the Bluetooth GPS receivers as they are far more reliable at present and actually record the whole trip, even though the data they produce is a bit more on the noisy side.

Pleased to report, companies (both big and small) have been finding out about MindFeed, through no advertising of my own, and are interested in potentially meeting up to discuss ideas and such. Happy days!

Other than that have been concentrating on my business plan recently hence the lack of blog posting. Hopefully things will kick off again soon once that is finished! Stay tuned!

The last few days have been spent getting the website more usable. Profiles are well under way, and users can now edit their profile data.

I have also made use of the GD library for PHP that allows me to manipulate images. I used this to resize uploaded user photos so that they are scaled to a width of 300px. This ensures file sizes are kept small, and bandwidth is minimal.

I have also changed the main front home page to show recently logged in users to encourage user interaction and show that the site is being used.

Finally today I have added script to create directories for users upon their successful registration. This allows me to store their uploaded files in their own file space which makes it easier to maintain. Also, directories are created in secure non web viewable locations for the purposes of uploading data, so that when potential trip data is unzipped, if there are any malicious files they wont be executed by Apache/PHP.

SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT!

We are getting there, though lots more to do!

Good news - MindFeed now works with both devices on board GPS without the need for Bluetooth dongle! Awesomeness. I don’t know why the devices needed a hard reset to achieve this, clearly some setting somewhere was not playing nice. Anyways it works so all is good.

After getting a second X800, I now have managed to get valid GPS strings from the device on COM7 which is a tad confusing as this is not mentioned anywhere in the settings - all options point to COM2 or COM4 for on board GPS integration. This was doable after I performed a hard reset of the device - beforehand I got nothing. I have found the updates to be much slower than my dedicated bluetooth GPS receiver, but shall test it out to see how accurate it is and if it is fast enough for a moving object!

Time to hard reset the other device and see if I get the same joy!

More to report soon!

Today I converted the smoothing algorithm I have previously been doing server side so that it runs in parallel with the client, thus taking load off the server when displaying maps and allowing for more accurate live feed information.

I have also updated the live feed user indicator icon to make it more visible.

Also on a good note, I have just heard that my other test GPS device has been fixed after some newbie broke the screen, so I should have two devices to play with soon!

I have successfully finished the rough template for the profile pages and also integrated with scriptaculous javascript functions for better usability. Scriptaculous allows you to apply javascript based effects to your divs and adds that little bit of extra shine to your site! Check it out by signing up and logging in!

A good days work.